"Have a lived life instead of a career. Put yourself in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses... If you don't like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joy of working can fill your days."
György Konrád - Hungarian novelist, essayist and dissident.
thepamphleteeruk@gmail.com

Friday, March 28, 2008

On Democratic divisiveness

The Democratic party's chairman of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean today called on superdelegates to choose their preferred candidate by July 1.

Dean says there is 'no point' in waiting all summer before the party decides between Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. It is hard to argue with Dean's view. Should the party wait until its convention in August it will give the nominee only just over two months to go toe-to-toe with John McCain. With McCain currently the only serious candidate confirmed for November's election, he holds potentially a clear five month head start in appealing to the nation to make him president.

The Democratic party nomination contest has long since turned nasty and there is little sign of the apparent enmity abating. This week Hillary Clinton has faced accusations that her revisionist recollection of a trip to wartime Bosnia was a cynical measure to gain political capital. While Obama's association with a lunatic man of God continues to damage his own campaign. The only sniper fire Clinton must evade comes from within her own party. The Democratic contest, which until recently was making headlines as the most exciting in years, now risks turning into a nasty, drawn out slugging match which can only play to the Republicans' advantage.

The Republican party has picked a candidate who is not a favourite with some of their own grandees. None the less, already they are getting behind him because he's who they're stuck. He has already begun visiting foreign countries and has come to Britain, met Gordon Brown and ludicrously claimed to be a descent of Robert the Bruce. By August they will have great momentum and McCain will have spent half of the year persuading Americans why they ought to give him their vote. Clinton and Obama will, if a decision is not reached by July, spend half the year persuading the remaining 350 undecided superdelegates why they would provide McCain with the best challenge. However, by then I fear McCain will be out of range of even the sharpest sniper.